


Writober 2: Electric Spookyaloo: Fics Day 13: Trapped/Fear

by indevan



Series: Writober 2: Electric Spookyaloo [13]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: F/M, Introspection, fears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 19:47:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16290635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: He calls her fearless so she lets him





	Writober 2: Electric Spookyaloo: Fics Day 13: Trapped/Fear

**Author's Note:**

> thiiis is probably my first time really writing something from 18's pov since she's always been very tricky for me to write, but i rather like this. also you know i had to leave in an offhand mention of my rarepair otp

She doesn’t tell him that she doesn’t like enclosed spaces.  Her brother doesn’t either. He’s mentioned it a little, being in the suffocating bell of Cell’s tail, but that’s not what got her.  With him, he struggled in it, trying to break free. For her, it was over in an instant. She was staring at it looming over her and her next memory is waking up on the lookout.  Her memories are from before.

When Dr. Gero would deactivate them, he wouldn’t do it right away.  He would put them back in their little pods and leave them there, in the dark.  She could see out of the little round window, but only just barely as it was above her head.  Sometimes she could hear her brother kicking against his and then. Blackness. Until he decided to wake them up again.  He would rhapsodize about them behaving and being “good,” but she never liked that. She hated him. Wanted to disobey him and rebel at every turn.  Neither she nor her brother had any interest in being his pawns. He kidnapped the wrong people.

People.

They were people before this.  Real humans. The brain is strange, though.  Dr. Gero took their humanity and took their memories but things remain.  She doesn’t know her name from before she was Eighteen, but she remembers being trapped before.

A house somewhere in a city.  In her mind, it’s all shades of gray like an old movie.  A woman angry at them. Yelling. Grabbing her by the hair and throwing her in a closet.  Holding the door shut. Sitting in the darkness, wondering when she’ll get out. Seeing the same being done to her brother.

Memories, other than that, are less clear.  Something will come to her every now and then but it’s a flicker, like she’s chasing tadpoles in a stream and can’t catch them in her hands.

Other times it’s a sensation.  Like she’ll hear a song on the radio and know what lyrics come next despite never hearing it before.  Or she’ll walk by an ice cream shop and remember what chocolate tasted like on her tongue.

She tells Krillin these things because it makes him smile and making him smile is very important.  She doesn’t know how to tell him that he’s the most important person to her. For a long time, even before Gero, she knows it was just her and her brother.  And after, it was still them. For a short time, they were a family of three. Her, Seventeen, and Sixteen. She had half-formed ideas she never vocalized of them getting an apartment, getting lives, when they were done with killing Goku.  Or maybe they wouldn’t have even done that. Who knows? Fate intervened and Sixteen is dead and Seventeen is shacking up with Goku’s beefy brother who likes working out and hates pants. But she isn’t mad. He’s living his own version of a happy ending and she has hers.

Her sweet husband who thinks she’s fearless.

“I’m afraid of so many things,” he says. “I guess when you’ve died twice, you kind of get that way.  I wish I was more like you.”

So she doesn’t tell him about the small spaces.  About the darkness. She just rolls her eyes and tells him not to be a baby while a smile tugs at her lips.  More than that, she doesn’t tell him her greatest fear. Of losing it all. That someone will press a button from a remote destroyed twice and she’ll blink out again.  She’ll turn off and it will be nothingness. Darkness. But not that. It’s the fear of never getting what she has again. Her husband, the child growing within her. Everything.

But he calls her fearless so she lets him.


End file.
